What's Cooking (Take Three!)

Long ago, but I can guarantee you it was the only soy sauce available in white suburban grocery stores of the era: Kikkoman!

Yay! The Wisconsin-made brand!

Really? I guess that is for the American line, perhaps the little glass jars with the red top.

Kikkoman is a huge Japanese company and makes many kinds of traditional Japanese soy sauce in Japan. I wonder how the recipes differ.

Jenise: Over two decades ago! Would have been approx 1999. And I still use it/love it. It's my go-to condiment soy. I also have Pearl River Bridge soys (Mushroom and regular-light) for various purposes.

I have Pearl mushroom soy and several kinds of tamari. I'm a fan of Lee Kum Kee products, and I have their Panda Premium soy sauce, which also tastes good. We have several Asian grocery stores here in Albuquerque. I love to peruse their aisles.

And, BTW, I've noted on your posts that you're an early riser. I barely function in the morning, bouncing off walls like a Roomba.

[Jenise]

IIRC, when I did the soy sauce tasting Larry refers to (Bob, myself and two friends spent an afternoon testing about 25 different soy sauces using little mats of rice noodles), I know I tried to find the Japanese Kikkoman. Don't think I did, but the Wisconsin version did not fare that well with 24 imported ones from China, Japan and the Phillipines. It tasted pasteurized/smoothed out, like something specifically made for the American palate. Still there were many worse ones that were fishy, or egregiously salty, or something else we didn't like. It came down to two winners, both from Lee Kum Kee who import/bottle about 10 different sauces. I recall that we equated them to fine examples of Bordeaux and Burgundy--depending on the circumstance, you'd prefer one to the other, but both were very complex, balanced and sophisticated. And both were, at the time, about $5 or $6, generally twice the cost of the others. Interestingly, they still sell for about the same prices today.

The newest addition to my soy sauce stable is from Japan, about $25 a bottle; super artisinal and they're aged in used whiskey barrels. We reserve it strictly for sushi.

[Jenise]

Larry said: "And, BTW, I've noted on your posts that you're an early riser. I barely function in the morning, bouncing off walls like a Roomba."

Two things: it's seasonal. I tend to go to bed later and sleep later in winter, and I'm often up in the middle of the night for a few hours so sleeping in to catch up is a must. Reasons vary, but this week it has been finding myself in a puddle of cat pee at 3 a.m. as my 17 year old orange girl seems to be losing control of her bladder. Distressing beyond belief, and of course it's about much more than changing the sheets in the middle of the night. I otherwise sleep well on the nights that didn't happen and have been waking up at daybreak.

I use Pearl River Bridge light and dark soy sauces. I also have Koon Chun thick soy sauce, which is sort of the Chinese equivalent of molasses and which I mainly use in fried rice. The Thais have a concoction called "sweet soy sauce" that is sort of like Chinese dark soy, but with a sweeter taste. I have a bottle of Healthy Boy brand sweet soy. I'm very fond of Lee Kum Kee's premium oyster sauce, which has a fishing boat on the label vs. the panda on their ordinary line. The difference is more oysters in the premium brand.

BTW, check the label carefully when buying Pearl River Bridge soy sauce. There's a knock-off brand called Pearl Gold Bridge that has an almost identical label. To make things even more confusing, Pearl River Bridge's premium line is called Golden Label.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Didn't know about the Pearl River knock-off. Nor about the Premium LKK oyster sauce. I'm pretty happy with the panda version--love it spread on fish before it goes on the grill. Pretty fine on a thin rib-eye, too. We always take it camping for an easy way to diversify simple campsite dinners.

Say, for dinner tonight we're having roasted chicken leg-thigh combos Zuni cafe style which means pre-salted ahead of roasting and nestled on a divine sourdough bread salad.

[Jenise]

Made the BEST dinner last night: Chicken and bread salad a la Judy Rogers' Zuni Cafe. At Zuni you order a whole roast chicken, but here I roasted two leg-thighs. The bread salad is torn pieces of broiler-crisped sourdough or other rustic bread, doused with a garlicky red wine vinaigrette that are tossed with a good variety of greens and then dressed with some (or all) of the roast chicken drippings and a bit of salt, like Maldon. OHMYGOD. To quote John F's thread: simple but profound. Nice with a Village burgundy, too.

Ribeye, asparagus, tossed salad, apple pithivier.

Shrimp pesto over fried mush!

[Jenise]

Last night, having braved Costco, I made a fresh Ahi poke that I finished with that $25 Japanese shoyu, the one aged in whiskey barrels. OMG.

Sunny weather today, so I'm going to grill some chicken thighs. I haven't made up my mind yet to use berbere or Jamaican jerk seasoning.

-Paul W.

Green chile stew (with beef) and flour tortillas tonight. Maybe a Corona beer drunk through my N95 mask.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any Corona, but I had one 16-oz can of La Cumbre Elevated IPA left (my favorite IPA). High proof, so it's like drinking two beers. But my green chile stew was good, and the beer hit the spot (I drink almost only wine nowadays).

What else but a ham that had been taking up space in my freezer?

[Jenise]

On Friday I managed to get to Costco. The swordfish I'd heard about wasn't there, but they did have very fresh and beautiful Ahi and Pacific Halibut. The Ahi became poke and the halibut was destined to become fish tacos yesterday afternoon before our Zoom meeting. But alas, my blue corn tortillas were moldy!!! So dinner was blackened halibut salad.

I decided on Jamaican--marinated the chicken thighs in Inner Beauty Ghost Sauce before grilling them. I accompanied them with Paul Prudhomme's Brabant potatoes, but fried in bacon fat rather than vegetable oil. It was good to be outdoors with the grill.

-Paul W.

A repeat of last week's Chicken Pot Pie goo over fancy-dan English muffins. I bumped the seasoning this time, with emphasis on savory and tarragon; that worked nicely.

[Jenise]

Yesterday for lunch we had smoked pork butt sandwiches. A local family who bought five acres nearby and are attempting a Green Acres sort of departure from corporate America, staged a deal where they smoked and sold 10-lb pork butts for $45 ea, reservations required (of course). These are the family I buy my fresh eggs from. We picked it up about noon yesterday, scalding hot and wrapped in about 10 feet of heavy duty foil. My god, it's the best I've ever had. I lamented on the way over that I didn't have tortillas or buns from which to make sammies, but lo and behold as we drove in to pick up our butt their ten year old daughter was handing out packages of a dozen burger buns--they were part of the deal, had no idea.

A fantastic lunch but much heavier than we normally eat midday, so for dinner I backed off and made main course salads of seared scallops on charred endive with cherry tomatoes in a dill-chive vinaigrette.

[Jenise]

Breakfast today: avocado toast and fresh oranges.

Dinner tonight: fresh corned beef hash.

Somewhere in between: a plate of lightly pickled vegetables.

Tonight I will make chicken cacciatore to eat and poulet a la normande for day after tomorrow.

Got a deal on big shrimp, so an impromptu shrimp/vege stir-fry with an egg flower hot and sour soup.

Nothing exotic -

This morning I made vegetable curry - to use some veggies that won't keep for much longer - which I'll freeze for a future dinner with some rice.

This afternoon I'll make a couple of no-knead loaves that use 2 x 250ml yoghurt as an ingredient and again the 500 ml yoghurt is approaching its use by date, so I'll freeze 3 halves and use the fourth for breakfast toast.

For dinner tonight I'm roasting cauliflower steaks with dhal (- somehow we ended up with two cauliflowers, plus the remains of a third. So some went into the curry.)

We didn't get the okra we'd ordered, so I'll do a stir-fry in oyster sauce of green pepper, cauliflower leaves and whatever else I can find in the fridge

Made some Bob's Red Mill Paleo Flour pancakes this morning. Came out surprisingly good.

Oh well, it happens sometimes. I burned some pork chops tonight.